Subversive groups and individuals within societies tell variants on these myths as a way of advancing their modification of the worldview or, more radically, their replacement for it. It is quite clear that the stories about Jesus which circulated in the early church functioned in some such ways vis-à-vis the early Christian communities and the Jewish communities from which, initially, they sprang. Therefore, if that is what we mean by ‘myth’, that is indeed what these stories, quite manifestly, are.
